Shadows & Tall Trees, Volume 8

by Michael Kelly

  Dan makes himself stop. He blinks, breathes, licks his lips and acknowledges that his childhood hasn’t been discarded after all, just buried beneath layers of better memories over the intervening thirty-five years, pasted down determinedly but still there, ready to be revealed in rips and strips. He swallows, feels saliva flood around his parched, beach-wreck of a tongue.

  After the garage, the revelations continue at a more sustainable pace. As the Mains opens out like a dusty photograph album, he sees the old church at the low end and the primary school at the high, both exactly as he remembers. The parade of shops strung between them, though, is a sorry sight. The butcher’s is still there but the grocer’s is now a budget supermarket, its window plastered with dayglow deals. Further along, the baker’s has become a knock-off Greggs, and the sign above McKee’s Newsagent, where Dan, suddenly, vividly, recalls buying Kwenchy Kups and Monster Fun on sun-soaked Saturday mornings, just says GIFTS now, barely a step up from a charity shop. He can’t remember what used to be where the grubby café is and several of the remaining premises are derelict, giving the impression of an old man’s leery grin. It’s just after five in the afternoon but this deep into October the street lights are already on. There are few souls about, and they huddle and scurry through the gloaming as if eager to finish their business and get home.

  Ursula noses the car towards a parking space. “Just going to pick up a couple of things,” she says. “Want to come?” Dan shakes his head. She holds his gaze for a second, the skin around those brown eyes delicate as leaf skeleton. “Right you are.” Grabbing her purse from the dashboard, she ducks out of the car and strides off towards the supermarket.

  Dan waits until she’s inside before he gets his phone out. Just two bars of signal but knowing he’s not completely cut off he breathes easier. He opens Facebook and sits for several minutes trying to think of something to say. Fuck’s sake. How hard can it be to post a photo of this shit hole and tap out a sarcastic note about how much things have gone downhill? Is he ashamed to be here? Is that what it is? Ashamed to leave the car out of fear that someone will recognise him? Ashamed his colleagues will judge him for his crappy beginnings?

  Well, fuck that. He’s proud of what he’s made of himself. Because of his crappy beginnings. Angrily, he starts to tap something out but a bubble of emotion wells in his chest. His eyes feel gritty. He blinks, breathes, deletes what he’s written.

  The truth is…

  The truth… is that it’s not Crawfoot. It’s him. Since the promotion and all that came after it he’s fallen out of the social media habit. He used to be such a proud man. He doesn’t have so much to be proud of any more.

  Instead of posting a message of his own, Dan scrolls through his feed. Ursula posted a link to some local produce initiative an hour ago, but nothing about meeting an old friend. Since their unexpected reconnection a few months back—her embarrassingly tentative I don’t know if you remember me—he’s learned that she’s not an over sharer. Maybe she doesn’t have much to brag about either. That’s something they have in common at least.

  Of his actual friends, the Americans already feel remote, geographically and socially. It’s barely been four months since his step up to European VP. The permanent move back to the UK is supposed to be a reward, a well-earned opportunity to spend time with his family while younger colleagues burn themselves out hitting the targets that’ll earn him his bonuses, but it’s all gone wrong. Somehow, a tear has appeared through his carefully layered lives and something has seeped through—Sara meet Courtney—and now he’s unwelcome in either of them.

  He likes a picture of one of his colleagues’ kids playing with the family dog in the front yard. Goofy pumpkins on the porch in the background. SoCal in the Fall. Movie shot idyllic. He really misses it.

  He turns lastly to his English friends. Most of them were Sara’s crowd and he feels grubby flicking through the streams of those mutual friends who haven’t completely cut him off yet, but he makes himself do it and is rewarded with snaps of Oliver at the nursery Halloween party. The wee fella’s done up in a garish costume. Some cartoon character Dan doesn’t recognise. He wants to like it, to heart it, to make some mark so that Oliver might know.

  He wonders if this is what it feels like to be a ghost.

  Dan puts his phone away and gazes out of the window. Ursula is taking an age in the store so he allows his attention to linger on a young mother struggling to drag her child past the coin-operated aeroplane outside the gift shop. There are stern words but the kid—about Oliver’s age, the blonde hair shorter and a shade lighter—has dug his heels in so Mum relents and fishes out a pound. The tears turn instantly to laughs as the machine jiggles into motion. Dan realises he doesn’t know if his own son would find such joy in something so simple. The mother intermittently checks her phone and glances hostilely around and, when she spots Dan in the car, she stares until he looks away. Next door, they’re switching the lights off in the café, the owner, about Dan’s age but with a shag of greying curls and a paunch overhanging his jeans, ushering the teenage waitress outside so that he can lock up. She hurries off without even making eye contact, and the owner watches her for several seconds too long before jangling the keys towards the lock.

  The aeroplane ride is over and the mother is now talking to Ursula, from whose hand dangles an unbranded carrier bag lumpen with groceries. Dan hopes she’s not gone to the trouble of planning something elaborate for dinner. He doesn’t want her to try and impress him. It’d be embarrassing. His face flushes as that ugly thought buds and blossoms from the branch of scorn that has burgeoned while he’s been sitting here.

  Jesus, Danny, he thinks. Try not to be too much of a dick while you’re here.

  The mother and child depart but, before returning to the car, Ursula pauses to look at the aeroplane. No, at something behind it. In the evening gloom Dan has failed to notice it until now. It’s like ripping off several layers at once.

  The tumshie tub.

  The old-fashioned hoop-bound barrel is shoved up against the wall, its iron rusting, its wooden struts green and crumbling. Ursula drops a coin into the Baxters soup can dangling from the barrel’s rim and then reaches deep inside to pull out a muddy, wizened turnip.

  “Fuck’s sake,” Dan mutters aloud.

  Ursula is smiling as she crosses to the car and opens the door. Hands him the shopping bag so she can slip into the driver’s seat, and then the turnip too. It’s the size of a child’s head, a shock of slug-ragged leaves sprouting from the top. Mud crumbles onto Dan’s Kühl jacket.

  “Remember now?” she says.

  *

  Memory, Dan thinks after fake-smiling through a dinner of microwaved rogan josh and awkward reminiscences, is a fucked up thing. What it chooses to show you, what it keeps hidden. What peels away easy and what’s stuck down hard. He can recall the feel of his old bedroom walls acutely, the fern patterns inlaid in the vegetal green. He must have been to Ursula’s family home—hers and her husband’s now—dozens of times but it’s entirely unfamiliar. They’ve talked for over an hour and it’s been stilted and frustrating. He doesn’t remember the things she thinks he ought to. He doesn’t want to talk about the things he does.

  Especially the Warding, Crawfoot’s take on the traditions of the season. Halloween when he was growing up had none of the fun that it has in America: no pumpkins or trick-or-treating, no parties, no cosplaying superheroes or film stars. It was serious business. During the week leading up to All Hallows, the village kids went guising to their neighbours’ houses. They’d wear sackcloth masks or ash-blackened faces so that they could pass for the spirits of the dead and carried a joke or a song to prove their humanity and earn an apple and a handful of nuts and sweets. Even so disguised, no child was allowed out without a turnip lantern to ward them. And not just any turnip either. It had to be taken from the tumshie tub and paid for with honest-earned coin. On Halloween night itself, an adult walked the Ward for the ‘good of the village
’. No-one else. That’s the story anyway. It came up several times in the conversation but he didn’t pursue it.

  It’s only now while watching Ursula across the cluttered kitchen table, working determinedly with knife and spoon to hollow the turnip out, that Dan is hit by a memory that punches right through to his soft grey plaster.

  He’s quite young because the garden wall is as high as his shoulder. A rowan tree dangles overhead, red berries glistening under the streetlight like winter poison. His nose is running from the cold and the air is bitter with bonfire smoke. As he totters after the other kids he can feel the candle inside his lantern rocking, its light guttering with every step, so he’s gripping the string tight and trying not swing it for fear that his fierce-grinning protector will snuff out. As he ducks under a branch he feels something touch his hair. He freezes but can’t bring himself to turn and see if it’s a rowan twig or Herself’s questing fingers.

  Fucking hell.

  Dan takes a long gulp of his wine. “I can’t believe you still do all this,” he says, trying to make his tone light but doesn’t think he’s quite succeeded. “The modern world still not quite made it to Crawfoot yet?”

  Ursula glances up from spooning yellow flesh into a brimming Tupperware. Its sweet, organic smell mixes with the stale spice from the plates that are wedged in between the sheaves of home-printed flyers for farmers markets and Shop Local weekends. “Hardly,” she snorts, glaring. Looking away, Dan’s eye falls on a stack of adverts for a local business forum. The paper is water-stained, the date some weeks in the past. “A Starbucks here would be a fucking tourist attraction.” She resumes scraping, but has something to add. “Actually that’s something I wanted to ask you about. Investment, reach, visibility. You know about that stuff, Dan. How do we do it here?”

  “Ha!” he exclaims, half out of surprise, half relief, because at last he gets it. Sees all of this for what it is. Thank fuck. Ursula’s been fishing, attempting to hook him with nostalgia. Trying to get him invested so that maybe she can persuade him to invest. She’d chosen a clumsy way to go about it, picking around the edges, trying to find a corner that’ll peel, but without success. Until that unexpected memory of guising just there. He won’t deny it shook him, but finding out that there’s a mundane, cheap-ass reason for Ursula’s invitation to visit makes it almost laughable. This is the sort of duplicity he understands. “I knew it,” he laughs. “I knew there was an ulterior motive for all this.”

  Ursula has a thing she does when something perplexes her, a sort of grimace between a frown and a smile. She’s doing it now. “Seriously?” she says. “You couldn’t just believe I wanted to catch up after all these years? Maybe rekindle a fucking friendship that once meant something? To me at least. Sorry if I’ve overstepped the mark in asking for a little advice.”

  Her defensiveness irks Dan. Why is she keeping up the pretence even after he’s called her on it? Is it face-saving? The village is dying on its arse because anyone with any sense leaves it as soon as they’re old enough to hitch a ride out. They always have. “You’re asking for the benefit of my experience?” he says. If it sounds patronising, he doesn’t care. “Well, yeah, in my experience there’s always an ulterior motive.”

  “Is that so?” Ursula tips out the last of the turnip’s innards then examines the exterior, tracing lightly with the point of her sharp little knife. Feeling the natural contours of the rough skin. She’s looking, Dan recalls, for The Face. Making her choice, she stabs deftly through the skin, then again at an angle to the first cut. After the third incision, a triangular plug pops out, leaving a crude eyehole. That’s how it’s done, he remembers. Your tumshie gets none of the Instagrammable artistry afforded to the fabled pumpkin. Ursula makes to slice out the second eye but instead she points the wicked blade at him. “All right then, what’s yours?”

  “My what?” he says, surprised.

  “Your ulterior motive. Why did you come here?”

  “Because you asked me.”

  “Simple as that?” she scoffs. “You don’t know me. We’re not friends and whatever history we shared, it is clearly long forgotten. It wasn’t even a direct invitation: You should come back some time and visit,” she parodies her own voice. “People say that sort of thing all the time. It’d have been easy enough to say you were busy with work or didn’t want to leave the family or… politely, say you had no interest in setting foot in this God-forsaken pit ever again, but you didn’t. You jumped at it. You were practically on the next train up. Why?”

  Dan deals her a boardroom stare but she doesn’t even blink. He takes another long swig of his wine and swallows slowly. There’s a sour edge to it that’s starting to curdle his stomach. Of course, she’s right. There was no good reason for him to come here. Even when Mum was alive, Home had been that pretty little cottage she’d moved to in Perth and, when she’d ever mentioned Crawfoot, it had been to curse the place. She never mentioned his Dad either, except that one time when he was very small and full of questions. He went away before you were born, son. She’d said it matter-of-factly, without rancour. And he’d accepted it because theirs was far from the only Crawfoot family that’d lost a limb somewhere down the line.

  Eventually, Dan says: “So, how long did you say your husband was away on business for?”

  Ursula’s laugh is a howl. “You always were a cheeky fucker,” she says, grinning as she goes back to carving the face.

  Dan laughs too, or at least pretends to. Thing is, he doesn’t even know if he was joking. A random fling? Really? Is that what it’ll take to make him feel like he’s got some sort of control over his life?

  The moment has broken down something between them though. He reaches for the bottle. “Top up?”

  Ursula glances up from knifing out a zig-zag grin. “Sure… ow! Fuck!” Her blade’s been too eager and there’s blood beading on her finger. She sucks it off, then shakes the pain away.

  Grimacing, Dan upends the bottle over her glass. There’s barely a dribble left. “Sorry for distracting you,” he says.

  “Don’t you remember?” she says. “A little blood lends the Warding that wee bit more power.” When Ursula turns the turnip around to reveal its ugly face, sure enough there’s a tinge of pink on the serrated teeth.

  *

  “This is stupid,” Dan blurts, and then recoils from the gust of boozy vapour he’s just expelled. The stink of it even overpowers the burnt cork Ursula used to paint his face. They’d exited the house looking like commandos, giggling, eyes alight. It’s less funny now as they creep past the old garage. He leans against the wall for a moment, silently cursing the speed they’d consumed that second bottle of wine and the eagerness with which they’d then moved on to the whisky. “C’mon, man. Halloween’s weeks away yet.”

  “It’s close enough.” Ursula’s voice shimmers off the bricks from a distance ahead. There’s no street lighting, so he can only see her by the light of the turnip’s glaring devil grin. “These days we walk the Warding as often as we can. Herself’s got greedy since you left.”

  She’s just fucking with him again, invoking Crawfoot’s own bogeyman: the supposed witch of the woods, blamed over the years for stealing the unwary and for any other general misfortunes that befell the town. A lazy amalgamation of folk tropes. Shit, they couldn’t even come up with a decent name for her. Ursula’s going to have to try harder than that.

  He pushes off the wall and in the darkness almost walks into the old petrol pump. Below the rotary dials that once counted the gallons, exposed here like teeth in an excavated skull, there’s a sticker: “Licenced to H&G Hutchison, 3 Mennie St, Crawfoot, Argyllshire”.

  Christine Hutchison got took by Herself. Thanks be to her family. The phrase echoes unwillingly in his ears. It’d been the village mantra that whole year. He remembers the fruit baskets and fresh loaves, the discreet visits and kind words visited on the family like they’d become holy or something. He remembers…

  It’s the Halloween night of
the year after Christine disappeared. There’s a crowd of them, young teens. A nervy knot of giggles and bravado. They’re too old for guising, so they’re going to walk the Ward. Do their duty, like the adults do, in Christine’s name. They’d all known her a bit at school, but their ringleader, Moira Lennox, had been her best friend. Their parents would have forbidden it of course, so they’ve all sneaked out, using their teenage logic to convince each other that doing it together—doing it for Christine—means they’ll be okay. They all say they’re not afraid but Dan can tell they are. He is too, and he doesn’t even believe in it. Even, or especially, despite what they’ve been saying about his Dad recently. They’re eejits when they want to be but they’re his friends. All the same, there are limits.

  Moira had rummaged through the tumshie tub with such care, scrutinised every ruddy skin until she found the one with the right face. Now, as they follow the lantern single file past the garage, the mood becomes solemn. Dan loiters at the back, not really sure what he’s doing here. What any of them are doing, really. Only Moira’s motive is clear, the lantern light illuminating her anger. Even without it earlier, her face had been glowing with defiance. The rest of the faces, as they shuffle through the choke, are pensive, each contemplating the real darkness outside of the bounds of the village and what, in their hearts, they either do believe or don’t believe or half believe, waits. One by one, they file out into the dark, the cheeks of some of them, Ursula included, glittering. Doing their duty.